Comprehensive visualization of the US Supreme Court. It works best as an office poster, obviously – and can be purchased that way for your lawyer friends. It’s the first project from TimePlots – I look forward to more good things from them in the future

Several sites have noted Google’s new “Image Swirl” toy (FlowingData for example). It’s fun to play with. An example search for “Santa” is below. I would add that the standard Google image search now has a number of really cool options: you can filter by image size, dominant color, and type of image (photo/clipart/drawing – those these categories aren’t always accurate). Filtering by image size, for example, can help exclude pay-for-image library thumbnails.

As a demo for their “visual fusion” software, idvsolutions has produced an interactive map and timeline of global ocean piracy. Not bad, though bing maps seems to be having trouble integrating with it a little.

This is a bit old (the data ends in July ’08), but I like this animated approach to displaying high frequency data over time. Something like this might be interesting to do for cross-country financial data-series.

Impressively, Jon Peltier came up with a way to do this in excel (and check out his blog for other really cool excel chart tricks and solutions)